"Launch? You're alive!? And as your violent self again," wide-eyed Bardock stuttered while staring at the blond bombshell dropping her devastating heavy weapon and picking up a glowing, metallic heavy assault rifle that could not have come from Planet Earth that had a lingering trail of powder blue vapor on the tip of its barrel.
"I'm not sure what's going on here, but you should find yourself a ship and get off the planet as soon as possible," Bardock's recently met, musclehead ally snarled through razor-sharp teeth with a hissing voice that seemed to get stuck somewhere in his throat a lot and make him have to spray to say. "Not sure what happened, but it seems like everyone's out for themselves in a desperate race to get off-world. Even the military is in on it."
"Heh, might have something to do with the leadership ditching the planet," Bardock snickered before wincing in pain and clutching the burn in his ribs. "If my Attack Ball was working, you'd have taken off in it already. I assume you broke it when you got out of it after the pod healed you?"
"Yes," the shark-bat alien hissed. "In my defense, waking up submerged in a green fluid in some kind of containment unit makes you twitchy until you realize what's going on."
"Great, just our luck," Bardock spat off to the side while staring at Launch sliding off the ashy dune while firing a few volleys straight at the marauders that still showed fighting spirit or those that weren't quick enough to flee from a losing battle. It seemed that what Launch lacked in superhuman physique, she compensated with a craving for borderless violence and a trigger-happy personality. "We'll need to snatch the Dragon Ball and find us a ship to get off this place. That's if the merchant didn't just take off with the Dragon Ball…"
"Good luck with that," the burly alien saluted Bardock before jumping onto one of the abandoned scrapyard war machines. Igniting the infernal engine that spewed wildfire from the nine exhaust pipes in the back end and thundered like a scorned hellhound, the alien marauder took off in search of a way to get off Planet Imecka. Something Bardock and Launch were better off doing too and soon.
"Hold up," Bardock gently put his hand on Launch's gun as she aimed to blow the fleeing alien up. "Whatever this rifle's firing, it's not worth wasting it on a guy I spent one of our Attack Balls healing."
"What the heck happened? Who roughed you up like that?" Launch mumbled in a softer voice, scanning Bardock's injuries. The sum of them rendered the Saiyan less than a reliable fighter, making blond Launch responsible for fending for their two-people party on Planet Imecka against the mob of wild marauders and raiders let loose and the Imeckan military, no longer constrained by orders or rules and armed with the entire might paid for by Don Kia's boundless greed and the only thing that surpassed it in depth–his paranoid fear of Saiyans.
"It doesn't matter now," Bardock shook his head, not about to admit how much he struggled against some unheard-of alien mercenary. "We need to pick up that Dragon Ball and find a way off this planet. The population is in a panic, most of them have been imprisoned and indentured to serve on this planet, meaning that the vast majority of them will want to get off the planet. It's a race against time."
Launch approached a bundle of, as of now, disowned speeder bikes and activated their suspension mechanisms, elevating them off the ground with a loud rumble. At least a handful of them appeared to be in a working condition, making them an ideal option for Launch, who could never traverse on a planetary scale, and injured Bardock to get to wherever the Ultimate Dragon Ball was. Seated, the two of them took off into the dusty wasteland horizon, seeing the bright lights of a social apocalypse that sparked quickly like a forest fire and escalated to consume the entire planet the moment Don Kia and his guard left off-world.
"My scouter's busted. We've got no way to find the Dragon Ball with the entire city leveled. It's not like we were locals and knew it that good to begin with," Bardock winced with a dire look on his face.
"Hmph… I'd have never expected your ass to be the one that needed to be dragged out of the mud," Launch scolded her companion, pulling out a scouter of her own from a pouch on her rear side. "We're in luck though, the Dragon Ball is still on the planet. That means that either the geek that had it croaked or he left it behind for you to find."
"There's not much use for it for those who don't know what it is," Bardock replied. "We're lucky that your scouter survived the collapse of the plaza. How did you make it out of that alive?"
"Heh…" Launch snickered, carefully pushing a lock of her curly blond hair out of the way of her nose to prevent an unwanted sneeze. "If that puny other me would've stayed behind, she'd have gone splat for sure. All the dust made her sneeze at just the right moment. Fortunately for the two of us, I'm made of sterner stuff. Even more fortunately, I'm used to asking no questions, just grabbing guns and firing at everything that moves by now. That's how I made my way to you."
The blonde raised some kind of handheld gadget in her hand, showing a beeping signal that must have still functioned in helping Launch track Bardock, despite the extreme damage to Bardock's spacesuit. Despite the extensive injuries, Bardock breathed a sigh of relief. He could hardly imagine a reality in which he let Launch die. For a moment, that was the only reality he knew and the one he had to struggle against. Deep down, the Saiyan swore that he'd power through a dozen Ledgics if it meant protecting Launch in the future. Weakness was a piss-poor excuse for a no-good loser.
"Are you sobbing?" Launch's lips soured to a dot-like length and her eyes stretched wide across her face.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Bardock smirked with moist eyes, wiping the moisture off. "It's just all the damned dust in the air, that's all."
"Good, 'cause I'd have had to stash you off somewhere and get your head checked out if you've gone soft on me, you hard-ass," Launch smirked and turned back to face the humongous road ahead of them that stretched far beyond the horizon and led through countless meaningless and turbulent battlefields of different raider factions fighting it out for whatever scraps were left on Planet Imecka to escape the planet on.
For the entire time that Bardock and Gine were together, he was the numb-skulled, angry, and loudmouthed barbarian who swung fists around and checked them into more trouble than he was worth. At the very least, Bardock had solace in the fact that his unruly strength and uncanny determination, willpower, and rebellious attitude smashed through the obstacles in their way and made sure both of them lived another day.
This was different. Just like that time on Planet Vegeta, against Frieza, Bardock's strength was just no good. No matter if he'd have won or lost against that blue-faced fighter, had their battle continued to its conclusion, one thing Bardock knew for certain was that he was too weak to settle things in an instant and that he lacked the strength to protect Launch. He lacked the one thing that made him worth a damn in this universe.
Rubbing his nose and dragging his arm from fist to the elbow in his moistening face, Bardock snuffed out the outburst of emotion that came up and followed the trailblazing blonde in front of him. Admiring her no-stop attitude, her almost suicidal perchance for violence as the bombshell pulled out a spare Uzi and unloaded it on some feuding raider gangs while the two drove past them, dropping a good dozen aliens that impeded her venting something with entirely unnecessary violence.
"This oughta be the place," Launch swerved her hovering speeder and pointed at the scouter that blinked with a Dragon Ball signal nearby. Bardock wasted a precious moment to scan the place with a shocked look, unable to recognize the leveled and buried in sand and ash ruins that the two of them occupied, compared to the futuristic and gloomy alleyways he roamed back when he first ran into the merchant holding the Dragon Ball before.
Grumbling in pain, Bardock limped to some place and blasted a Kiai shockwave from his palm, splitting the ruins and opening the ground where he aimed into a crater that should've revealed whatever was buried behind. No luck. Dragging his tired body further, Bardock found himself another place to check and continued to blast random holes, hoping to see that orange twinkle.
"Found it!" Launch raised her hand, wearing a ruined fingerless glove, above the ground level. In it, she clasped to an orange marble with a bundle of black stars on it. The madwoman had buried herself well over her head in the sand. Smiling, Bardock limped to the pit and helped Launch out of the hole, patting her on the shoulder for a job well done.
"Now we just need to find a way off this hellhole," Bardock sighed in frustration.
"All the ships the aliens confiscated were on that sissy's warehouse. Most of them were busted on purpose, but the military must have the most spacecraft that are the closest to working by far. We don't have much time, they've got to be fending off raiders left and right as they're scrounging the city ruins for parts to repair the ships they've got," Launch said, locking and loading her stolen arsenal, as well as what remained of the guns and ammunition she's brought along.
"We don't need a fully operational ship," Bardock hissed. "All we need is something that'd take us off-planet and drag us to the nearest space station. We can repair the ship fully there."
"Alright then, let's get us a ship and blast our way out!" Launch flashed a smirk full of bad intentions as she holstered a heavyweight alien plasma assault rifle over her shoulder.
A circle of stacked war machine scrap made for a makeshift wall from which a squad of soldiers fired down upon the rushing horde of rabid wastelanders, looking for their golden ticket off-planet now that the embargo was lifted in the most archaic way possible. Roaring, Bardock dashed through the mob of raiders, swatting them aside with the speed and intensity of his dash as the unfortunate scoundrels rag-dolled off Bardock in all directions.
Launch flicked a switch on her speeder bike, activating a couple of powerful plasma cannons that fired flashy, yellow ion missiles, spiraling around one another on their way to the nearest enormous war machine on the battlefield. Whether it be Launch's battlefield sadism, her pure luck of hitting the correct target, or some combination of both, the blonde hit the war machine's fuel tank and drowned it in a booming fireball that eclipsed even the fortified circle of scrap that the military was fending off attackers from.
Fiddling with the control panel of her speeder bike, Launch switched something in her mounted cannons, forcing them to fire a widespread destructive barrage of plasma bolts, downing raiders, and desperate tourists by the dozen with each passing second while Bardock crashed into the scrap circle and tore it open with his bare hands, shoving his right arm into it and firing an unchained Ki blast that leveled the entire military encampment.
No matter how much those wastelanders and trapped townsfolk wanted to leave, seeing a calamitous burst like that obliterating a fortification that every manner of scoundrel tried taking for hours now made them reconsider their choices and flee for their lives. Leaving Planet Imecka meant freedom, staying around here meant certain death. Strutting across the flames of his own demolition work, Bardock approached the nearest fallen soldier and pulled him up.
"All this here's just a bunch of junk, isn't it? If you had any functional spacecraft, you'd have left long ago," Bardock answered that which the soldier must have expected him to ask.
"N-Not all of it's… Junk…" the soldier muttered, injured and overwhelmed by the destructive power of this curious duo that wandered into his encampment. "There was… An Earthling carrier vessel… But the wastelanders took it off us… Blew up the warehouse… Left us fending for ourselves. The bastards must be halfway across the system by now."
"Bullshit!" Launch snarled, shoving the barrel of her rifle up in the injured soldier's face as if threatening to blow his whole head off the soldier's shoulders. "I was on that vessel when they peeled it open–it's in no condition to fly!"
"It was… In the best condition… We didn't have time to… Strip it and… Sabotage it yet," the soldier insisted.
"Bunch of dumbasses," Bardock dropped the soldier and walked away, leaving him lying there. "Sabotaging the ships of the people they kidnapped so that they can't leave finally blew up in their faces. Now none of those assholes can leave."
"But… That only means that someone's got our ship," Launch walked past the injured soldier and approached Bardock from behind. "This eye do-hickey can track it if they didn't mess with our ship and remove the tracker."
"That's our best shot then," Bardock sighed, clenching his fists and feeling some of his lost power surging back. It was a long cry from what he needed to fight at his peak, but it should have been more than enough for him to stop feeling dependent on Launch's love of gun-totting. Instead of returning to his bike, Bardock gently hovered off the ground, spreading a halo of dust and ash in all directions while Launch, knowing where this was going, rushed back to the speeder bike and hopped onto it.
The Capsule Corps vessel was parked on top of a gargantuan quadrupedal machine station. Its building-sized legs could no longer shift and drag across the wasteland. Instead, it hovered above the ground via electromagnetism and skidded across the air. Seeing Launch lagging a bit behind him, Bardock gritted his teeth and settled on the idea that he didn't really need her help. If he only sped up and caught up with the gigantic metal station, he could blow it up, vacate it off any raiders, and get their ship back. Just as Bardock was about to dart on forward and extended his arm to pelt the rumbling scrapyard, he felt something out in the infinite universe.
Power. Unconditional, supreme, and wholly unleashed. Rambunctious, but also desperate and unnatural. The sheer size of it, not to mention the fact that Bardock could feel it all the way on Planet Imecka, from wherever that signature was resonating from, made the Saiyan stiffen and turn around. With bewildered eyes and a loose jaw, Bardock stared off into the sky. There was also another…
"What the…!?" Bardock stared off into the green skies of Planet Imecka, blinking rapidly as if he were refusing to believe what his other senses were telling him. Two powers completely dwarfing his own were colliding out in space, with one of them rising to an utterly ludicrous degree. Bardock's sweaty and spaced-out expression shook in awe of it. What was even harder to believe was the fact that he knew whose Ki had escalated over the moon just now. It was Krillin, one of his son's Earthling friends. But how could that have been possible?
"Bardock, what in the hell are you doing!?" Launch barked out, rolling up to the stunned Saiyan with her jet bike and skidding below him to halt it while keeping the engine rumbling. "Those bowl-heads are getting away with our ship! If we don't get it back, it won't matter if we find the Dragon Ball or not!"
"Right…" Bardock turned away from the skyrocketed battle power that shook even the corner of the universe in which Planet Imecka was situated, more than a dozen solar systems away. An awe-inspiring power-up such as this would have likely spread much further and washed away even at the edges of the universe with a rowdy echo.
Bardock never saw the Earthlings as competition in terms of battle power. He never counted them out. They were powerful fighters, to be certain, but never a direct competitor to him. Not after he's awakened the power to become a Super Saiyan and then developed it further into the stage of the Hyper Super Saiyan. And yet, somehow, Krillin sent the peak of his strength so far over what Bardock would have deemed acceptable and beyond what he considered even being possible, that ignoring this power was flat-out impossible.
"Let's go, I don't have time to waste on this!" Bardock gnashed his teeth and pressed his knuckles to his sides, vanishing away a few times in rapid succession before appearing in front of the rumbling heavy-weight machinery put to work by the Imeckan military, and occupied by lawless vandals looking for a way off-planet, that towed away their ship. "I've got training to do!" Bardock declared before punching his arm through the armored shell of the quadruped tank and ripping a poor, unsuspecting wastelander in the Imeckan military officer armor, with a bowl-shaped metallic helmet, out of the vehicle and flinging him a few kilometers away.
Bardock ripped into the heavyweight products of the Imeckan military industry with a passionate battle cry, ripping all the heavy weaponry apart with his bare hands while sending the under-prepared and weakling goons flying like feathers from a fat bird that was being ripped apart and devoured where it stood. By the time that Launch sped up to the place of brewing conflict, there was nothing but scattered bodies and smoldering piles of scrap laying about with Bardock staring off into the sky with his hand on the precious and secure Capsule Corps vessel that nearly got stolen by these bowl-headed mooks.
"This doesn't look flight-ready," Launch said while panting after rolling up to the repossessed vessel and checking it up from an outsider's point of view.
"It's a good thing we've got a whole sky-scraping scrapyard around us to borrow parts from," Bardock grumbled, leaning to pick up a few good starters.
"You mean you can fix the ship?" Launch put her hands over her waist, unsure if she should trust someone known for their knucklehead attitude, loud mouth, and itchy fists.
"I've been a soldier since before the age your Earthling kids start their formal education. I've had more missions turn bad, and more ships crash than land successfully. I was also a revolutionary for years, living off the scrap that me and my squad looted of beaten Frieza Army squads. I can fix this ship," Bardock explained at a cool and methodical pace that calmed Launch's concerns. "We'll take more than we need. We'll need to sell off the spare parts in the nearest station to earn us enough currency to bargain for the parts we actually need."
Before long, rumbling and shaky, the Capsule Corps vessel took off and shot into the green Imeckan skies, leaving the planet's atmosphere with no sight of the blockade that once had a stranglehold over the planet. Bardock flicked through a few switches, checking up on the system report and slumping in the pilot's seat.
"Hmph… The communications system is down, but I think it just needs a few quick turns and a reboot. Too bad the medical system is down. I could've used a good soak," Bardock grumbled to himself while staring at the ceiling and feeling the weight of his tired eyes, that not even the blinking lights around him could help him fend off. Before too long, Bardock was snoring.
"Damned lug…" Launch grumbled with her arms crossed. "Now we'll be floating around until he's done catching Z's."
Launch spat on her sleeve and rubbed the dirty control panel that Bardock stained with blood and ash, not stopping his scrubbing until it was shiny. Then, something odd hit her and the blonde kept her stare locked on her own reflection in the spotless plate of steel. She had a smear of machine oil over her face, probably from one of the war machines she and Bardock blew up. The bombshell rubbed the back of her wrist across her face, but just one rub wouldn't cut it. Frustrated, the blonde began rubbing her dirty face furiously, until she felt a tickle of her curls rubbing against the tip of her nose.
"Oh, shi… Awchoo!" Launch sneezed. The next time she straightened her back and glared at her reflection in the reflective steel surface, her hair and eyes were blue and she lost some weight in the shape of muscle off her body. "Oh, my…" she gasped, smacking her cheeks. "Communications down? That doesn't sound good…" Launch pondered to herself before leaning down and opening up a compartment where she knew Bulma had the flying manual placed in case someone sensible ever loaned one of her ships. "I better consult the manual…" Launch wondered to herself before her look settled on the sprawled and snoring Saiyan in the pilot's seat.
"Bardock-san looks tired. I should roll him off to bed. Oh, my… He smells so rancid!" the blue-haired lady pinched her nose. "I wonder if the shower's working? It really can't be helped with this rowdy man, besides, he's almost naked anyway…"
The cooperating duo finally stumbled into what passed as a little bit of peace and quiet after a rough time on Planet Imecka. One Ultimate Dragon Ball richer, still alive and breathing, Launch, and Bardock flew off into the boundless universe around them, looking for a place to repair and resupply. While space stations were a dime and dozen, given the limitless proportions of space, it still took a little bit of skill to find one when one needed one.
Even though they may not have known that yet, Launch and Bardock were under a much tighter time limit than the one year it would have taken for Planet Earth to explode.